Free vector graphic from St Louis web designer
Inspired by a simple geranium in my St Louis garden just coming into flower, here is a spring vector graphic for you to download and use however you see fit. Enjoy
2010 © St Louis Web Designer
A couple of time saving Google Tools
Here are two time saving tools recently launched by Google.
Firstly if you are a blogger and use Twitter to promote your blog posts (it was one of my best uses of Twitter – Can Twitter Help My Business), Google’s Feedburner now incorporates a “socialize function”. This allows Feedburner to automatically tweet any new blog post directly to Twitter. It can be customized in a variety of ways including
- Post content: Title, Title and body or body only
- Inclusion of a link
- Automatic creation of hash tags
- The ability to add custom text
A nice little time saver, you can read more about it here: AdSense for Feeds: Socializing your feed with Twitter.
Secondly is the Share button built into the latest Google Toolbar, download it here.
The share button enables you to send any page you visit to a huge variety of social networks, blogging accounts, email address anything from Facebook to Yahoo Bookmarks. It provides a shortened version of the URL – particularly useful for Twitter accounts where you are limited to 140 characters.
As usual both of these tools are offered for free. What tools are you using to save time?
Click for more tips and tricks
2010 © St Louis Web Designer
The anatomy of a repeating pattern: Free vector download
Looking to design a unique repeating pattern? It is easier than you think.
Start with a simple shape like an oval
Duplicate and rotate to form a flower shape
Duplicate horizontally
then vertically
Voila!
Printed out these are a great coloring project for kids.
Download repeating pattern here
2010 © St Louis Web Designer
Free Vector Graphic: Winter Theme Pattern
In honor of the “great snowfall” we are due over the next 36 hours, here in St Louis, here is a free vector graphic of a repeating pattern with a winter theme. The great land of Twitter is busy speculating inches. Snow anyone?
2010 © St Louis Web Designer
Holiday Greetings from the St Louis Web Designer.
I like to produce a digital holiday card for my customers each year and this year have spiced it up with a custom video produced using xtranormal. “If you can type you can make movies”. Its a great application and easy use. You can select from a whole bundle of characters, give them different accents set the background, camera angles, make them move and apply ambient sounds… and all for FREE. What’s not to love about that.
Free Vector Graphics: Circular Pattern Set
Enjoy this set of free vector graphics from your St Louis Web Designer
2009 © St Louis Web Designer
ipod earbuds fall out of my ears. Do yours?
Music can often be a great inspiration to me when I am in designing and my ipod is always on my desk. However, hands up if your ipod earbuds fall out of your ears? Mine do, the standard ipod earbuds were swiftly replaced with an in-ear pair but I still have problems with “fall out”.
A St Louis company, Yurtopia™ has come up with a fabulous novel product to end this misery: the yurbuds™. They convert the standard ipod earbuds to custom fitting earbuds which are not only more comfortable but they DO NOT FALL OUT!
A pair costs just $19.99
Visit
and get free shipping with this code: QF5SG
2009 © St Louis Web Designer
Free Vector Patterns
I have always been drawn to patterns (no pun intended!). As a kid I loved geometry coloring sheets and my first job in design was the creation of anti counterfeit patterns for currency. More about that another day!
Here are a couple of simple vector patterns for you to enjoy.
2009 © St Louis Web Designer
Free Credits for istockphoto
Here is a great tip if you are looking for free credits for iStockphoto.com
I regularly use them to source images for web and graphic design projects. They have a wealth of very reasonable priced images which is always popular with my clients. The cost of stock photography can really rocket if you are not looking in the right places.
Their stock is priced in terms of credits and they offer three options to purchase these credits via “pay as you go”, subscriptions or via a corporate account. Pay as you go works well for me.
However there is also a way to earn free credits. If you have incorporated some istockphoto stock into a project you can submit it via the Designers Spotlight page, you do need to be a member but membership is free. Every piece goes through an approval process but if it is approved it gets added to the new projects album and you are awards five free credits.
Don’t you love free stuff!
Generate revenue from your websites: AdSense
Looking for an easy way to make some additional revenue from your web site? Try Google AdSense.
A small snippet of code placed on your web site will generate Goggle ads earning you revenue based on a cost per click or cost per impression basis. You can fine tune the look and feel of the ads to compliment your site, have control over the size and shape and even block competitors ads from appearing on your pages. It is completely FREE .
Is Adsense right for your website? Here are a few things to consider
- What levels of traffic does your site experience? Sites with a high volume of traffic will bring in more revenue.
- Does your site rank highly for any popular keywords or phrases? Our site on counterfeit detection ranks very highly for the key phrase “counterfeit detection”. Due to the popularity of this phrase there are plenty of Google advertisers bidding on this phrase for the display of their adverts and hence no shortage of ads to display on the site.
- Are you comfortable having advertisements on your site? Despite the high traffic and favorable key phrase ranking Indigo Image gets, we are not comfortable having Google Ads featured on our site. They could offer our visitors a reason to leave and explore the services offered by another web design/ graphics arts company. It is possible to block competitors sites but blocking all advertisers bidding on a generic key phrase, e.g. in our case something like logo design, is not feasible.
- Do you have a suitable area on your site to display ads? To get the most out of the ads they need to be placed in a prominent place. Does the design of your site accommodate this?
I have a couple of personal site with pretty high traffic and excellent rankings on the search engines that are a perfect platform to display Google ads. The ads were configured to compliment their color schemes and feature prominently at the top of each site without being too intrusive. They provide a steady stream of revenue.
